


Till Human Voices Wake Us

by AlchemyAlice



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Prose Poem, Prufrock, T.S. Eliot-inspired
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-29
Updated: 2010-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-23 02:17:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlchemyAlice/pseuds/AlchemyAlice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by/a remix of <i>The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.</i></p><p>Arthur becomes aware that he has grown complacent. He can see Cobb wondering how long he will tolerate his stasis, and a part of him rages at the notion that this man who dragged him across the globe still believes that he would run now, even if he had in the past, for a brief time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Till Human Voices Wake Us

**Author's Note:**

> For coldthermistor at inceptionkink.

He's known for a while now. 

To be more accurate, he suspects for some time. Before the inception, but after everything went wrong. It isn't something he feels safe contemplating; it isn't as if he has the right.

He didn't earn much from Arthur over the course of that awful year; if anything, he owed.

But then he comes home; he comes  _home_. 

And Arthur goes to Chicago. 

Then Toronto, followed by Johannesburg and Brussels. 

Cobb doesn't stop him, doesn't think about the tightening in his chest. He lets Arthur go, his own words stifled by doubt.

In the end, it amounts to this: one year of freedom, in exchange for one year of unwavering service. It is all terribly neat and tidy, in retrospect.

Cobb didn't think of it that way, of course; he didn’t know that it would just be a year. He simply thought of it as a withdrawal that he more than deserved. It didn't even occur to him to speak, to dare. 

But then it is a year later, almost to the day, and Arthur is on his doorstep, on a California morning that is crisp but warming fast, his sleeves rolled up and collar open, and Cobb thinks of loyalties that didn't last, and this one that somehow has.

He opens the door and steps aside, unsure of what's to come.

***

 _It was Arthur's turn to run (though the last time had been, too). But it was his turn, this time, to run from things unsaid._

He does his banking in Chicago, calls on family (briefly, painfully) in Toronto. He does a job with Eames in Johannesburg, even though he doesn't have to, and he buys a small safe house in Brussels. He sends postcards in each city, scrawled with the same address but no message enclosed. He doesn't have anything to say, after all--nothing that would leave the waters undisturbed.

And then it is a year, and Arthur is rich beyond imagining, has seen the world from beyond the confines of a clandestine exile, seen it as he always knew he ought to. 

He stands in Departures at Charles De Gaulle, watching flight times scroll and flick, and swallows down the ache of indecision.

He lets time and a ticket lead him, a ticket and a taxicab to an address he had scrawled so many times. 

He doesn't like taking the lead, it’s not his part to play. But as he walks up the steps, expensive shoes on well-worn oak, he thinks perhaps he can at least begin this scene.

***

They fall into place easily, perhaps too easily. This has always been their way, this quiet push and pull. It’s what made them great, when situations beyond their control had asked them to be so. 

It takes a day or so for things to settle, an afternoon in which Phillippa and James squeal at the return of their father’s messenger and friend, and an evening over drinks in which Cobb smiles more widely than Arthur can remember (since Mal, that is, but he is careful about those memories, and rarely lets them surface). 

They split the bottom half of a Dalwhinne bottle, diluted over ice, and Arthur sets down the file he’s been clutching to his side.

Cobb casts an eye to it. “Are you going to tell me what that is?”

“Only if you want in.”

Cobb smiles, the old spark of hunter’s pride in his eye, but then he shakes his head.

“I’m old, Arthur,” he confides, that smile still lingering but smoothed with wistfulness the young lines of his face are not meant to capture. 

“Don’t roll your trousers yet,” Arthur replies. The scotch has eased their companionship, despite the file upon the table. 

Cobb snorts quietly. “The kids will keep me young,” he says, but Arthur doesn’t know if Cobb believes it. 

He stays the night, and then just stays.

***

The balance is perfect, enough to set it on a scale and let it swing. Arthur leaves when he needs to, though it isn’t for the money anymore. Cobb gets a job at UCLA, teaching architecture, and his boredom is palpable, if not also forcibly subdued.

They come and go from the house like ships passing in the night, and it is simultaneously a relief and disturbing that the children find this normal. 

Cobb teaches Phillippa mathematics and lets James build massive rambling structures in Legos on the living room floor, and Arthur sits and watches as they both try to draw letters in neat (though slightly crooked) crayon rows. 

When Cobb finally enrolls them both in school, they are over-educated, brimming with ideas, and their teachers despair.

And Arthur becomes aware that he has grown complacent. He can see Cobb wondering how long he will tolerate his stasis, and a part of him rages at the notion that this man who dragged him across the globe still believes that he would run now, even if he had in the past, for a brief time.

But he keeps that feeling in boxes, stored away.

Arthur begins to wonder whether, if he dared to dream with Cobb again, they would find a vault between them, filled with unacknowledged things.

***

It is an unfair irony that the characteristic that connects them, lets them understand each other, is what stymies them now. Because weeks pass, and they are both unwaveringly, passionately, devotedly silent.

Arthur is somewhat surprised that Cobb, finally, is the one to dare. 

The children are at school, and Arthur is making tea while crosschecking a dossier he lifted from a less-than-savory contact in Bombay. Cobb comes home from holding office hours looking ruffled and professorly, his hair falling in his eyes despite clearly having been pushed back in frustration multiple times over the course of the afternoon. He sets his briefcase down in the hallway and wanders into the kitchen, where he stops.

Arthur looks over his shoulder, and sees an expression he doesn’t recognize on Cobb’s face. “Hey,” he says, “Long day?”

Cobb takes his time in answering, but that isn’t unusual. What is, is what he says. 

“I keep expecting to come home and find you gone.”

Arthur sets his tea upon the table. 

“And the many, many times that hasn’t happened does nothing to make you think otherwise?” he asks. He thinks that maybe if he’s still enough, the world will stop tilting, and he will stop wanting to throw teacups at the wall.

Cobb ventures further into the kitchen, like it doesn’t belong to him.

“What. What’s in it for you?” he says. 

It is an overwhelming question. One that Arthur isn’t prepared to answer. Time stretches in silence, but Arthur knows that even in reality, where there is no dream to blame the dilation on, he can think within those fleeting seconds of a million answers, a million evasions, a million words and none.

No words can fully capture how he is a moth to Cobb’s flame. 

Cobb is waiting now, his dread clouding the room. Eventually, he says, “Arthur, I’ve told you before. I’m old, even if not by normal standards, and I’m out of the game. I don’t want to…I can’t presume anything. Not with you.”

Arthur stares down at his tea. There is time still to reverse, time still to add more words or take some back. Time still, but he is immobile with unspoken want.

Footsteps sound behind him.

The warm and hesitant press of Cobb’s hand on his shoulder is comradely, but Arthur leans into it all the same. And that small sway seems to say enough to turn the press into a slide, Cobb’s fingers making gentling trails down to his shoulder blade. It pushes him to say, in a startled and stuttering rush, "I'm not going anywhere, okay? I'm just not." 

Cobb thinks of washing up on the beaches of Limbo, and how the ecstasy of creation gave way to the emptiness of knowing that, even with Mal, everything that was offered to them there was just their own minds, giving back. How despite that emptiness, they still lingered there, remained so willing to fade away. 

He thinks that Arthur could spare him those visions and revisions of a life that never happened, of walks on sand and white linen trousers, and an endless sea which did not speak.

The solidity of that possibility beneath his palm is something he is certain he does not deserve. "What can I give you?" he murmurs.

And Arthur hates that he has to ask. He shuts his eyes and turns, the tea at last forgotten. Cobb is close, close enough to read his restlessness, and his hope. 

“Come here,” Arthur says to him, and prays that is enough.


End file.
